Tag Archives: topography

Artist Kim Rugg’s incredibly meticulous artwork consists of slicing up and breaking down everyday sources of information, like newspapers and maps. Dissecting newspapers, she rearranges the words and letters, creating a new depth of meaning. She often cuts the letters out and places them in alphabetical order, throwing the message in disarray. If these newspapers were real, they may cause panic and mayhem, as they disrupt our normal access to worldwide information. Can you imagine if even online news from all countries suddenly appeared as Rugg’s newspapers do? Both her surgically cut newspapers and transformed maps deconstruct society norms of information and the restrictions our culture has placed upon them, and therefore us as well.

This London-based artists slices up maps and pieces them together again backwards, or purposely arranging the once solid land mass in a way that fuses together all elements of land, border, and ocean. She also creates her maps by hand, erasing borderlines and geopolitical issues that are so relevant in today’s society. Her recreations of man-made territories display a new topography; a world with no boundaries, where we all can live with no territorial restrictions. Each carefully incision made forms a part of the whole, redirecting your view to its small details. Rugg’s complex work invited you to investigate the information laid out right in front of you that is often overlooked. Other work of her that require our close inspection to really understand her subtle manipulations include magazines, comic books, and even cereal boxes. Her work can be found at Mark Moore Gallery in Culver City, CA.

Carl Krull uses repetitive lines to form hidden faces revealed between the lines. Each drawing contains endless line after line that flows across the composition in waves, drips, and swirls. The organic rhythm created is quickly interrupted by different shifts in its pulse, not unlike a line in a heart rate monitor. It is incredible how the orientation of the lines create such different effects, resembling the texture in tapestries or the grooves and patterns in a topography map… but only if the hills and mountains depicted were in the shape of faces! In fact, Krull’s large-scale drawings have been referred to as “human seismographs.”

Amazingly, the Danish artist came up with this technique by drawing lines during a road trip across the United States with his wife, acting as a “seismograph” would. Each bump, twist, and turn of the drive was incorporated into drawings, which are included in his series Scroll Drawings.

Krull’s work, created entirely from graphite lines, takes the human body form to a whole new level by letting the negative space between his lines to let the eye create the shape. Each bend in the line creates a rift in space in which you cannot tell whether the form is concave or convex. His drawings are as mysterious as they are intriguing, as they defy laws of space and gravity. The faces and appendages emerging from a sea of graphite mesmerize you while you search for more figures amongst the methodical chaos. The massive size of Krull’s drawings further pull you into the hypnotic repetitiveness of each composition, with figures that materialize right before your eyes.

Rose-Lynn Fisher – whose anatomical bee photographs we have previously featured – has recently completed a series of images she calls “The Topography of Tears” that represent a study of 100 types of tears photographed through a microscope. During a difficult time that yielded a copious amount of tears, Fisher began to wonder if her grief tears looked the same as onion tears when viewed under a microscope. Using her own and others’ tears, Fisher was able to create a varied landscape of tear structures, demonstrating the diversity to be found within tear types. Fisher’s images almost resemble aerial views, these tear structures fractally resonating with larger scale structures found in the world.

Fisher says, “Tears are the medium of our most primal language in moments as unrelenting as death, as basic as hunger, and as complex as a rite of passage. They are the evidence of our inner life overflowing its boundaries, spilling over into consciousness. Wordless and spontaneous, they release us to the possibility of realignment, reunion, catharsis: shedding tears, shedding old skin. It’s as though each one of our tears carries a microcosm of the collective human experience, like one drop of an ocean.” (via smithsonian mag)

Stephanie Herr is a German artist whose topographic sculptures speak to humanity’s interaction with the natural world and dissociation thereof. Painstakingly cut by hand, her mapping of sausage and chicken breasts in styrofoam reference our pursuit of complete knowledge and control of the world at large, charmingly jabbing its warped products through her topographic style. This isn’t to say her works are merely didactic condemnations of mankind’s imperialism, her work is as critical of it as it is inspired by its imagination and absurdity. Political or not, Kerr’s work is a real pleasure to look at. (via)